


Misconceptions & Truths

by saturninepen



Category: Kane Chronicles - Rick Riordan, Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-23
Updated: 2012-03-23
Packaged: 2017-11-02 09:48:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/367666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saturninepen/pseuds/saturninepen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Graveyards are special places, for more reasons than one. Five scenes exploring Anubis' relationship with the New Orleans graveyard and the people in it, invited or otherwise.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Misconceptions & Truths

**Author's Note:**

> Unbeta'd and expectedly rough in places. Not really a crossover, but listed under PJO for mentions of Nico.

_i_. He had always thought that the view of graveyards as a place of mourning was a misconception. At the very least, it wasn’t an entirely accurate picture. True, almost nobody ever came to one without meaning to grieve (except for those goth kids who thought tombstones and skeletons were turn ons, but he really wasn’t sure what to make of them – mortals were just weird sometimes), but the fact still remained that, to him, graveyards weren’t meant to be places of pure grief.

Mourning required love, after all.

It was one of the many reasons why he preferred the small graveyard in the French Quarter of New Orleans more than the others: it was a city with so much history, nestled across the mightiest river on the continent, and a city where the dead were celebrated; funerals here were celebrations of life, and it all reminded him so much of Egypt.

More than anything, graveyards were meant to be places of remembrance.

-

 _ii_. He wasn’t sure if he liked being alone because he was the god of the dead, or if he was a good fit for being god of the dead because he liked being alone, but he suspected the former; it didn’t matter what pantheon you looked at, gods and goddesses of death were rarely if ever included in much. Of course, there were Odin and Freyja from the Norse belief, but death wasn’t really included in their portfolio so much as they simply had an association with it.

Besides, Hel made up for it; she was alienated to more severe a degree than anyone he knew, even for a death god.

Whichever the reason, the fact ultimately remained that he liked to be alone. However mortals viewed graveyards, they rarely stayed longer than they had to, but he liked it that way; these places, and especially this one, were his as far as he was concerned. It was his sanctuary, and sanctuaries were meant to be private.

It meant he spent most of his time associating with the often times slightly confused spirits of the recently deceased who hadn’t quite figured out where they were supposed to go yet, but that was alright by him. It was his job to guide the dead, after all.

-

 _iii_. It was another misconception that gods of the dead didn’t feel grief. They may seem callous and uncaring, heartless, emotionless and whatever other applicable adjective there was, but they weren’t. They felt just as strongly as anyone else did.

Anubis stood on an above ground tomb, staring at the watery mess that lapped below him. What pained him most was that he hadn’t _noticed_ , not in time; the flood would recede, after all, but he would have thought he would notice the damage Katrina was doing to his graveyard while he could still do something to prevent it.

Instead, he hadn’t even noticed anything was wrong until the number of souls passing through the Hall of Judgment had inexplicably doubled.

Debris filled the brown water, as well as a corpse and a rather sodden dog that was swimming hopefully towards another partially submerged tomb. Tree limbs had snagged against tombstones, and the Spanish moss that normally hung off of the cypress trees floated lazily in ragged clumps.

He was really going to have to have some words with Poseidon about this.

And then he was going to set up precautions to make sure _this_ never happened again.

-

 _iv_. The first time he felt the presence of an actual _intruder_ , it was gone almost before he could seek out the source.

Slinking through the tombs and grave markers as a jackal, he could smell the boy before he ever actually saw him, and the odor made the fur along the back of his neck bristle; by the time he’d actually found the kid, he could feel a growl rumbling low in his chest, too low to be heard by a human.

If the smell hadn’t been enough to confirm his suspicions, the sword of Stygian iron hanging at the boy’s waist was.

Dressed in an aviator’s jacket with a black shirt and jeans, dark haired and dark eyed, the boy – he couldn’t have been more than twelve – reminded Anubis of himself. If it weren’t for the fact that he was a _Greek_ traipsing through _his_ graveyard, he might even have liked him.

The god of the dead had barely started contemplating what to do with the demigod – killing him would likely result in an inter pantheon conflict (or at the very least, one between himself and Hades), but he wasn’t too pleased with this boy being in his graveyard – when he abruptly vanished into the shadows, rather as if they had grabbed him.

The death god was slightly confused for a moment, but it hardly bothered him; all that mattered was the son of Hades had left.

-

 _v_. The second time his New Orleans graveyard hosted a non-mourner, she was there on his own invitation. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d brought someone here, if he ever had before, but Sadie Kane had already shown that she wasn’t like other mortals.

It didn’t hurt that she was currently hosting Isis, either.

It was odd, though, because he’d brought her here mainly just to get away from Horus – and Bast, if the cat ever decided to come back after he’d chased her off, though he doubted she would – but the conversation somehow managed to cross into territory he’d never been to before. He wasn’t sure why he couldn’t keep his mouth shut – he was god of the _dead_ for Ra’s sake, not some adolescent priestess of Hathor – but, well...he had established that Sadie was unlike most mortals.

And, sharp tongued though she may be, the questions he asked as a requirement for her acquisition of the feather of truth soon showed a vulnerable side he doubted she had ever shown to anyone before; seeing it here, in this place, Anubis began to feel a deeper connection to the young girl sitting next to him.

It made his graveyard that much more powerful a place for him.


End file.
